Palenque's most famous tomb produced both a genuine archaeological landmark and, decades later, one of pseudoarchaeology's most durable claims.
Finding the king
In 1952 the Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruz Lhuillier cleared rubble from a stairway inside the Temple of the Inscriptions and found it led down to a sealed royal tomb, undisturbed since burial. Inside lay Pakal, who had ruled Palenque for most of the seventh century, his face covered by a mosaic jade death mask and his body laid in a massive carved stone sarcophagus, one of the richest royal burials found anywhere in the Maya world.
What the carving actually shows
The sarcophagus lid depicts Pakal at the moment of death, falling into the open jaws of the underworld beneath the world tree, in imagery consistent with Maya cosmology found elsewhere. In 1968 the writer Erich von Daniken proposed instead that the carving showed Pakal operating a rocket ship, an idea with no support in Maya iconography or epigraphy that mainstream archaeology rejects outright, though it remains widely repeated outside academic literature.
A city that wrote before it built the tomb
The inscriptions covering the temple above the tomb, some of the longest hieroglyphic texts in the Maya world, record Palenque's dynastic history in enough detail that Pakal's reign, and the tomb built for him, can be dated with unusual precision from the building itself.